I’ve tried my best to say as optimistic as possible in regards to what I’m currently dealing with at work. Everything happened so fast and before I knew it, the most turbulent three weeks of my career started on Monday. It gets better. Everything eventually gets better, but I can’t help but worry over just how bad is it going to get first. How badly am I going to perform during this time. How poorly will others at my job think of me once this is all done and over with. I’m doing the best that I can with what I’ve been given and my abilities, but I keep getting dealt crappier hands than before.

And I’m so tired. I’m so mentally drained and just exhausted by it all. I can deal with the stress-induced appetite loss, the way the female body likes to react to high levels of stress… but what I ultimately don’t deal well with is when I find myself creatively mute. I’m so mentally spent, that I can’t produce anything in any creative outlet. I feel silenced. I caught myself this evening just staring at a cross walk signal countdown from the front passenger seat of the car I was in. As the numbers changed, all the lights and the intersection seemed surreal. I just stared and wondered if maybe I would wake up from a bad dream and realize that my boss never quit. Realize that the responsibility of doing my job, my boss’s job, and that of another member of management… all during a time that the company is transitioning things, employees are turning in notices, and corporate visits are looming in the next few weeks… was just a really really bad dream. But it’s not. This is my current reality and I just hope I survive it and not loose my job.

No updates, no new pages, no new art…. Hopefully the next time I check in, things will be a little brighter.

…you squint really badly, curse, and trudge on to the best of your abilities while you wait for the stinging to pass.

I received some news at work yesterday that will most likely be turning things upside down beyond anything I’ve had to deal with before in my career. And this news was delivered while there are ongoing events that are still uncertain that were already going to make things unstable. I’m honestly still in shock over the news and trying to figure out how to go about managing it all once it does go into official effect.

Unfortunately, I have no comic page ready for upload this week. It’s in progress, but not finished. Rather than put it off until next Friday, I will certainly be uploading it as soon as I finish it. I’m committed to not letting everything that is about to hit the fan at work stop me from working on Thinking of Utopia. I put in a few hours on it last night, and although my progress was slow due to how jumbled my mind was, it was still progress and it did help me IMMENSELY to deal with the stress of the news I’d received at work. I believe focusing even an hour a day to my creative outlets will help me keep my head above water and at least maintain some form of control on something when so much else is out of my hands.

ON ANOTHER NOTE! Not related to lemon in eyes. How about this being the one week marker to marriage equality? I was absolutely ecstatic last week when I heard the news. I actually started crying I was so happy. It’s certainly a step in the right direction, but sight must certainly not be lost on all the other steps still left to be taken in reaching equality for all. One day. And we are currently one step closer.

I fell a week behind with getting page 20 up, but it’s finished and uploaded. I’m not thrilled that I’m not steady at every Friday the update is out. However, I will certainly take a one week delay over my months of silence that I’d been prone to in the past.

Had an interesting day. Unfortunately, it did set me back some. Hard to concentrate when my mind is a mess. And that’s pretty much what it’s been since the end of my shift. Had a string of conversations with my boss that eventually led to him figuring out something about me that I’ve just never really spoken about. At first I thought he was joking, especially since he tends to do that often. And I also often have trouble picking up on his sarcasm. Eventually I just asked him if he was joking or being serious with me concerning what he’d said. He thought he’d figured it out and that I didn’t know… that he’d helped solve some of my issues because he made a revelation for me. Not the case I ended up informing him. I was very much aware of what he’d figured out, but I just never talk about it and operate by just not acknowledge it. I’ve functioned this long doing it. It just makes my stories that much more important. Courage is certainly lacking. :/

Alright! I got the page sketched out, inked clean lines, and got it scanned. Now on to the coloring with a cooperative tablet stylus tip. I have the late shift at work tomorrow, so I’ll see how far I get before I should crawl into bed.

So, clearly page 20 didn’t get put up over the weekend. I’m actually currently working on a third draft of it. I just couldn’t make up my mind on which route I wanted to take in how the story is told. I wrote this part over so many friggin’ times and thought that I’d finally made a concrete decision before I started drawing. Apparently not. So, the flow finally felt right on this third version for how I want it to continue on thru the end of the first act.

I also did have an outting on Saturday. I’d learned a while back about a Pacific Rim convention in Atlanta, GA and was dead set on attending. I managed to get the weekend off and decided to let Saturday be a fun day. I couldn’t have been prepared for the amount of awesome I was to encounter there. It honestly felt like I was a freshman in college again, hours deep in Yahoo! chat rooms with role play buddies of my fandoms from back then. I didn’t know a single person there and was amazed by how friendly everyone was and of course, how into Pacific Rim they were. I quickly realized that it wasn’t strange that, back when I first saw the movie, I instantly had an urge to cosplay Dr. Newton Geiszler. I loved how many of the attendees were cosplaying and that quite a few of them were dressed as Newt. It certainly made me want to finally get around to making that cosplay happen. I no longer felt odd about having had that strong urge to do it back then.

I spent my first portion of the con in the Artists Alley. I was blown away by all the amazing artists there. Being a biology major and no art in my background, it really amazes me to see all their work, especially in regards to the Jagers and Kaiju… I just can’t even begin to try to draw them. I mean, I tried drawing a leopard gecko a few years ago (I have a pair as pets) and, oh boy… let’s just say that sketch got laid to rest. Not to mention the skill of taking real life people and bringing them to life in their own styles! I have quite a hard time with that conversion for some reason. I’ve tried it a handful of times and just was never pleased with what I’d come up with. The other amazing thing that happened while I was browsing in the Artists Alley? I was blind-sided by a pairing that had never crossed my mind. I recently discovered the whole Avengers Science Bros thing with Tony Stark and Bruce Banner. Why it didn’t come as second nature to see Dr. Newton Geiszler and Dr. Hermann Gottlieb as a pairing, is beyond me. But there they were, depicted in some amazing works and I was head over heels with that pairing. However, these kinds of pairings and fandom-esque things I’ve never partaken-in, in all my years, anywhere beyond the internet. The closest could be some cosplays that I did way back when, where I did run in to other cosplayers who liked the same pairing I did. So, I pretty much tired to keep my self calm and collected, and my usual super shy self while talking with the artists. I purchased some prints and certainly tired my best not to be a babbling idiot. Lacking social skills coupled with shyness can be rather overwhelming.

It really shouldn’t surprise me that my job got the better of me this week. Page 20 will go up on Saturday (possibly Sunday). I’ve got a somewhat late mid shift for Friday that will most likely keep me from finishing up page 20 for upload same day. At least I’ve got a few days off here after Friday’s shift and another small batch of days off in two weeks. There are no family surgeries in the near future so my upcoming days off should actually be dedicated to working on the comic so that I won’t fall severely behind on my Friday update schedule anymore.

I was planning on having it up early this morning, but I had an interesting development on Thursday. Prior to MomoCon, I’d been very busy with my job in preparation for a visit from corporate. So I pretty much went straight from my job into MomoCon. Then, once the con was over, it was straight back into work for me since it was my store’s annual physical inventory. Technically, I shouldn’t have been able to do MomoCon due to the upcoming inventory, but my boss was gracious enough to approve my time off and get things covered. Anyways, I finally had a day off Thursday and got to much needed cleaning in the apartment. Once I was done and sat down to finish working on page 19, I ran into a problem with my tablet. It was on, the cursor was moving along the path the stylus made, but I couldn’t click on anything. I finally took a good look at the stylus after enough unsuccessful attempts to click on things and that’s when I noticed what the problem was. My stylus was missing its tip. I then recalled that while I was vacuuming around the coffee table earlier, the vacuum sucked up something that made a noise but I didn’t give it a second thought at the time.

I did manage to avoid going into a full panic and allowed myself the distraction of a movie with my sister while I let things settle in my mind. I ended up remembering that I had a set of tips from my previous tablet that died on me last year. They were not a perfect fit, but my tablet did recognize the contact point and I could finally click on things. However, since it wasn’t a perfect fit, the tip kept falling out. I ended up having to work on my tablet at an odd angle as to keep gravity from snatching the tip. This slowed down my productivity and before I knew it my eyes had grown heavy and I had to go sleep. A work shift was in the mix for today and then I was finally able to finish page 19. I have also since ordered a set of stylus tips that should arrive Saturday. And there was much rejoicing.

I had the pleasure of participating in Momocon’s Comic Artists Alley this year. It was my third Artists Alley and certainly the largest con I’d attended. I had lots of fun and enjoyed the opprtunity of talking to people about Thinking of Utopia. I also really loved being able to do cute bird drawing commissions!

A big “welcome” to those checking the site out from Momocon! Page 19 will be up this Friday and hopefully things will be a little more consistent for me in the very near future. I’m looking foward to finally reaching a set update schedule and perhaps evening doing a couple more cons in 2015.